The Thing You Don’t Talk About …

Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash

There’s an idea I first encountered while training to be a therapist—one that has stayed with me ever since. It goes something like this: the thing we don’t talk about, the thing that stays hidden or unnamed, is often the very thing that most needs our attention.

I can’t say this is always true. But I can say this—whiteness fits that description in my life.

For a long time, I didn’t talk about whiteness. I didn’t think about it. I didn’t notice it. I was taught—explicitly and implicitly—not to see race and not to wonder how it shaped my life. Avoidance was framed as neutrality. Silence as goodness.

But after years of paying closer attention—both to race and to myself—I’ve come to believe that whiteness is the thing I need to keep talking about.

This summer marked more than two decades of marriage to the person I love most, and over twenty years in an interracial partnership. Marrying a black man and building our life together in the U.S. made race unavoidable in a way I hadn’t known before. It entered my daily life—not as an abstract concept, but as something lived, felt, and constantly present.

Over these years of noticing race and getting to know my own whiteness, here are some of the things I’ve learned I can’t stop naming.

1. Whiteness was created to hold power, not to foster shared humanity.

Whiteness, as a social construct, ideology, and culture, was designed to maintain control. It was built to justify domination and protect advantage, even at the expense of equity and connection. Naming this matters. At the same time, having white skin does not mean I am destined to cause harm or that I must uphold what whiteness was built to do. But if I want to live differently, I have to recognize and understand whiteness—and what I’ve absorbed from it. For me, that means ongoing practices of questioning, relearning, and facing who white people have actually been.

2. White people, collectively, have not earned trust when it comes to race.

We have a long history of enacting power over others, building systems that advantage us, and telling stories that obscure those realities. I’m not responsible for everything white people have done, but I am accountable to that history—to know it and to decide what I will do with it. Learning more about race has made it clear why people of color have long been wary of whiteness. That mistrust didn’t appear out of nowhere. There is wisdom there, and I have much to learn from it.

3. Naming racism is not a personal attack on me.

I grew up in a mostly white world where conversations about race were often framed as accusations or unfair targeting of white people. Those ideas took root in me. Racism, though, is a collective problem—one I was taught to ignore or explain away. And even now, I sometimes notice defensiveness rise in me when people who are harmed by our racial system speak about their experiences. That reaction disturbs me. It forces me to ask why I feel centered instead of attentive, and why I’m thinking about myself rather than listening to another person’s pain.

4. Whiteness taught me how to move between power and victimhood.

I’ve learned how whiteness trains white people to play the role of oppressor—and when challenged, to shift quickly into the role of the victim. This dynamic keeps us bound, limits imagination, and narrows what feels possible. In that sense, I am not free. Whiteness keeps me stuck in a version of myself that doesn’t align with who I want to be. I have to keep asking: How does whiteness shape my relationships? How does it influence how I see myself and others? Where do I need to be made free?

5. The way I was socialized as a white person conflicts with my values.

This misalignment creates real tension. I feel pressure to perform whiteness in ways that don’t match my beliefs about justice, dignity, and shared humanity. I’m still learning the language for this struggle. Writing has become one way I practice asking harder questions: What is required of me if I believe justice should be for everyone? How does that differ from what I was taught about race? Who helps hold me accountable to the life I want to live?

6. Focusing only on the harm done to people of color is sometimes used as a way to let white people off the hook.

For a long time, my understanding of racism centered on what was “going wrong” for people of color. I didn’t consider how racism was shaping and implicating me. Shifting the question has changed everything. Instead of asking only what racism does to its targets, I now ask what’s happening with white people. How are we sustaining racial inequity? What would it take for this to be a problem we feel responsible for—not just something we observe?

7. I’ve been learning how to be white my entire life.

Race has always been present, even when I didn’t have words for it. That’s the nature of living in a racialized society—we don’t get to opt out. Whiteness was so normalized, so close, that I couldn’t see it as something learned rather than inherent. I have to keep asking: What have I been taught by whiteness? How has it shaped who I’ve been—and who I might become?

8. The version of whiteness I inherited doesn’t serve me—or anyone else.

My racial socialization trained me to maintain a system that harms others and diminishes my own humanity in the process. When white people insist we have nothing to do with present-day racism while actively benefiting from it, we live a lie—and that lie costs us something essential. I don’t have to accept the place assigned to me. Examining whiteness has shown me that while choosing something different can feel uncomfortable and destabilizing, the possibility of becoming more whole and more free is worth it.

These are the things I keep returning to.

The things I can’t unsee. The things that ask me to stay in the conversation—even when it would be easier not to.